GSN announces winners in its 2013 Homeland Security Awards program

Thu, 2013-12-05 02:45 PM

Chuck Brooks

Government Security News is pleased to announce the winners of its GSN 2013 Homeland Security Awards program, which were selected from hundreds of nominations submitted by leading vendors of IT and physical security products and federal, state, county and municipal government agencies, highlighting their most noteworthy programs and projects.

The 2013 awards program was made possible by generous sponsorships from BRS Laboratories, Cardinal Point Strategies, Objectivity, Vanguard Integrity Professionals and Wave Systems.

GSN also owes a debt of gratitude to its blue ribbon panel of judges that included Charles (“Chuck”) Brooks, vice president/client executive of Xerox and the first director of legislative affairs for the Science and Technology Directorate within DHS; Scott Greiper, president of Secure Strategy Group; Paul Goldenberg, CEO of Cardinal Point Strategies and member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC); and Matt Johnson, cybersecurity expert and veteran of the DoD Intelligence Community.

In a first for the GSN Homeland Security Awards program, and a fact that reflects the growing importance of IT and cybersecurity in national security, vendors of IT security solutions submitted more nominations than vendors in physical security, despite having only half as many categories to enter. Commenting on this development, lead judge of the 2013 IT security awards, Chuck Brooks, commented:

“In the past, much of cybersecurity has been reactive and the trends are to be proactive. The trend is toward a more holistic approach of integrating technologies, processes and people. The future of the practice will rely more on informed risk management. That requires an active strategy of detection, recognition, identification, response and remediation of threats. Advancement in areas of predictive data analytics and diagnostics to index, provide network traffic analysis and protect against further incursions is already becoming a growing area of concentration.”

Echoing the remarks of the judges of the physical security and government agency awards, Brooks added, “The most difficult aspect of judging the awards was that companies and products submitted were all best-in-class. They are all winners. Several of the entries were spectacular. One of the winners, RSA, demonstrated some really specialized capabilities across many cybersecurity areas, including anti-malware, endpoint security and continuous monitoring. This is most important to the future of homeland security. The director of the FBI recently noted that cyber is one of the largest and most dangerous threats we will face in the near term. It is great to see that the companies that submitted entries for the GSN awards are at the cutting-edge of cybersecurity solutions across the threat spectrum.”

[Editors Note: Additional insights and commentary on the state of the art in homeland security will be available in a Government Security News interview with Chuck Brooks that will be published in GSN’s upcoming 2013 Digital Guide to Homeland Security Awards, which will be released later this month.]

Also demonstrating the difficulty of selecting winners in the 2013 roster of outstanding IT Security awards entries, the judges felt they had no choice but to name co-winners in a number of IT categories. These included RSA SecurID and Vanguard Integrity Professionals as co-winners in Best Identity Management Platform; Agiliance and Vanguard Integrity Professionals as co-winners in Best Compliance/Vulnerability Assessment Solution; Lieberman Software and Xceedium in Best Privileged Access Management Solution; and Cyber Ark and Redseal as Co-Winners in Best Continuous Monitoring Solution.

In the vendors of physical security awards, big winners included Axis Communications, which was declared winner in “Best Thermal/Night Vision/Infrared Cameras” and “Best Video Storage/Digital Transmission Systems,” while FLIR got the winner’s nod from the judges in “Best Chemical Detection Solution” for its Griffin 824 and for “Best Nuclear/Radiation Detection Products,” for its Identification R 300 product; Cohu HD was selected as winner in the important categories of “Best Long Range Detection Products” and “Best Specialized CCTV Lens Technology”; and Desktop Alert was winner in the “Best Regional or National Public Safety Communications” and co-winner with AtHoc, in “Best Mass Notification Systems.”

In other always-hotly-contested physical security categories, HID Global was winner in the Best Integrated System for HSPD-12 FIPS 201 Compliance; Quantum Secure was tapped as winner in “Best Platform for Physical/Logical Access Control”; Panasonic took the award in “Best Network IP Cameras”; newcomer to the GSN awards competition, and a sponsor of the 2013 awards program, Wave Systems, was named winner of “Best Smart Card Solution”; Stanley Security snagged the prize in “Best Biometric Identification System; Sielox LLC was winner in the “Best Interoperable First Responder Solutions”; and Vidsys took the top prize in “Best Physical Security Information Management System.”